Loren Madsen

Frankel, David, Artforum International

MCKEE GALLERY

In Loren Madsen's For Next, a piece he showed in this gallery back in 1986-87, 2,000 thin five-inch-square copper tiles hung from the ceiling by a thread tied at each corner to form a continuous carpet at, as I remember, a little under shoulder height. Below, where sculpture usually finds the floor, was empty air; above, where there's usually empty air, was a transparent thicket of supporting threads, both present and bodiless, like steady rain. Near one end of the carpet the tiles swelled into a low mound, an effect achieved simply by strategic shortening of the threads. All at once, the piece defied gravity, explained the illusion, and startled - classic magic.

A number of sculptures in the recent show - a collection of smaller works dating from 1988 to 1995 - showed the same desire to outwit gravity and the same self-explanatory clarity of method. Madsen may craft a surface by knotting metal plates together at their corners: make the plates square, and the surface can be flat; make the plates trapezoidal, and the surface will have to curve in toward the spherical to account for the rectangles' shorter sides. Use trapezia and you'll end up with something like Retort, 1990, a decentered copper bulb that Madsen hangs up near the roof, sealing both the imagistic idea of the distillery and the formal idea of the vanishing base by attaching to its neck a spindly oak coil, suggestive of chemistry-lab pipe, that twists toward but does not reach the floor.

Barc, 1990 - there are versions in both copper and galvanized steel - is another airborne vessel, this time a long dome-ended cylinder like a torpedo, or a very big Tylenol capsule. The title's hint of the marine is reinforced by a long open slot in the work's top that turns it into a boat, which gets off the ground by the row of cables that suspend it from the ceiling. …

The rest of this article is only available to active members of Questia

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.